New scientific developments, addressed throughout this book, which challenge the SBS hypothesis present challenges for courts that relied upon the outdated and unchallenged hypothesis to convict caregivers of child abuse. The law is notoriously slow to respond to scientific advances, and its strong fealty to finality makes reopening old convictions, even those that are dependent on flawed science, procedurally difficult. This chapter addresses the challenges posed for courts by shifting SBS science and analyses the bases, and slowly developing movement to reopen old SBS convictions based upon outdated and flawed science.

The Williams’ gang slaves illustrate the long history of wrongful convictions of defendants of color in US courtrooms as well as the compatibility of slavery with incarceration. Still, it was not until the demise of slavery as an institution that black and brown people became a majority of those incarcerated. That trend continues to the present. The latest innovation in the long history of racism and the carceral state is the emergence of private, for–profit prisons and the prison–industrial complex. Much like the domestic slave trade of another time, captives of color are redistributed to locations where their labor is in highest demand for the profits of others. But already by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the historical memory of the internal slave trade was growing dim, the rich history of slavery in the very capital of the United States forgotten.